Mark Frohnmayer, a Eugene entrepreneur who is the son of one of the state's most prominent political and governmental figures, has filed a proposed ballot measure to create an unusual non-partisan primary system in Oregon.

Under this system, all of the candidates for a particular office would run against each other in the primary, with the top two finishers advancing to the general. That system is familiar and has been adopted by both California and Washington.

However, under Frohnmayer's plan, voters wouldn't be restricted to supporting just one candidate. They would be able to vote for as many as they wanted. The idea is that this would help ensure that a candidate opposed by a majority of voters wouldn't emerge from a crowded primary with just a weak plurality.

"What really inspired me to do this was the federal government shutdown," said Frohnmayer. He argued that the shutdown was sparked by Tea-Party friendly members of Congress who won office by catering to a relatively narrow base of conservative primary voters.

"The primary system we have now effectively disenfranchises a third of the voters right out of the gate," said Frohnmayer, referring to the third of voters who aren't registered with either the Democratic or Republican parties.

Frohnmayer, 39, also has a more personal reason for feeling like the current electoral system doesn't work well -- what happened to his father, Dave Frohnmayer, in the 1990 race for Oregon governor.

That year, Frohnmayer, then the Oregon attorney general, was the Republican nominee. But the Oregon Citizens Alliance -- an anti-abortion, anti-gay rights groups -- ran its own candidate in the general election and Democrat Barbara Roberts ended up winning with 46 percent of the vote. (Frohnmayer went on to become president of the University of Oregon).

Frohnmayer blames his father's loss on that third-party candidacy, which he said split the moderate-to-conservative vote. Under his plan, this couldn't happen because only two candidates would be allowed on the general election ballot.

At this point, Frohnmayer's plan is a long way from reality. He filed the measure this week with the Oregon secretary of state's office and has several steps he has to go through before he can even begin collecting the 87,213 signatures needed to qualify for the November, 2014 ballot.

There are a number of prominent politicians and groups that have supported a non-partisan open primary in Oregon. But their ardor was dashed in 2008 when former Secretary of State Phil Keisling qualified an open primary initiative for the ballot, only to see it defeated by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.